[Quothling]

> wrap an external tool in a privacy architecture

Wouldn't it be more accurate to call Apple's architecture data protection rather than privacy? As an European citizen in a post Snowden world I would be surprised if any of my data on Apple services was actually kept private from the US government, and Apple certainly wants to own a lot of data/metadata about you. Gotta have Siri listening for carplay and so on. I would aboslutely trust Apple not to sell my data as a commodity though.

> If Apple handles the Google-Apple boundary right, this will be an elegant move on their part, otherwise it will feel like Apple Intelligence with a just a privacy-polished frontend for Gemini.

I'd say this is spot on. At least if what Microsoft is doing with Copilot Cowork is anything to go by. Cowork is not a privacy-polished as much as it's an Enterprise compliant polish to make Opus 4.8 run "safely" in your enterprise organisation. So far Microsoft is winning the AI war in non-tech enterprise with this, especially here in the EU. If Apple manages to do this for the private market that will be great for them.

I'm not personally sold on what an AI should do on my phone though. I use a lot of AI professionally, but I haven't even turned on Bixby or whatever the Samsung AI is called.

[miki123211]

From an EU perspective, Microsoft is doing data protection, Apple is doing data privacy.

Microsoft's approach to data is basically "we promise nobody else but you and your government can access it, we can but we pinky swear we won't." This promise is mostly enforced at the legal layer and through legal consequences, not technical safeguards. If they think they can get away with it (or are forced to get away with it by the US government), there's nothing stopping them from using your data in whatever way they want.

When they can, Apple designs their systems so that they physically don't even have the capability to use your data, even if it's processed on their own servers. They're not privacy maximalists like Signal is, they care more about user experience, but they do aim for the highest level of privacy you can get while still having a good experience, and when they do need to make sacrifices, they typically let you opt into the privacy features if you really want to.

I'm far more inclined to believe that Microsoft is secretly (or not so secretly) collaborating with the US government than that Apple is.

[tguedes]

There has been anecdotal statements/blogs from Apple employees about the data privacy. They have said building some internal capabilities or user facing features are extremely difficult or impossible because they aren't able to access user data at the level required.

[the_mar]

From the information presented, the privacy case is not that your data is only accessible to you (which arguably can have a backdoor) but that the data is NOT stored at all, so it's not possible to build a backdoor. I know there are probably other ways around it, but it's my understanding is that no data is kept on any server when the response is sent back to your device

[antiframe]

I don't think the Snowden allegations were about employee access to user data.

[ziofill]

Do you have any examples?

[tguedes]

There is a comment in this thread from an alleged Apple employee that said that, but it doesn't seem like it's possible to send a link for a specific comment. Over the years I've seen comments and blogs posted here in Hacker News reaffirming the same thing.

But to answer your question directly, I don't have any links for those blogs or comments

[rusk]

> it doesn't seem like it's possible to send a link for a specific comment

Click on where it says how long ago the comment was posted

For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48461367

[tguedes]

Thank you!

[tguedes]

I'm replying again because another commenter showed how to link to a comment

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48456081

[JimDabell]

> Wouldn't it be more accurate to call Apple's architecture data protection rather than privacy? As an European citizen in a post Snowden world I would be surprised if any of my data on Apple services was actually kept private from the US government, and Apple certainly wants to own a lot of data/metadata about you.

Your conception doesn’t seem to match PCC at all. The whole point of it is that nobody can access the data, not even the people running the servers.

https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/

[Quothling]

I don't trust a single US tech company to keep my data private from the US government. Maybe I need a tinfoil hat, but I don't feel like I'm unjustified in this based on the history going back to echelon. Not that this is a particular jive at the USA, my own government (Danish) actively pushes for mass surveillance and non-functional e2e encryption.

There is still a difference though. Google will sell my data and use it for all sorts of things. Though I've obviously accepted that since I have had a Samsung flip phone since Apple made their iPhones too big for my pockets.

[jesseendahl]

This part of their requirements for how PCC is architected directly addresses your concern:

“Verifiable transparency. Security researchers need to be able to verify, with a high degree of confidence, that our privacy and security guarantees for Private Cloud Compute match our public promises. We already have an earlier requirement for our guarantees to be enforceable. Hypothetically, then, if security researchers had sufficient access to the system, they would be able to verify the guarantees. But this last requirement, verifiable transparency, goes one step further and does away with the hypothetical: security researchers must be able to verify the security and privacy guarantees of Private Cloud Compute, and they must be able to verify that the software that’s running in the PCC production environment is the same as the software they inspected when verifying the guarantees.”

[brianmcnulty]

They do this by allowing you to download all of the components (minus data cryptexes containing the model weights) and run it on your own Apple silicon chip (you can put your computer in recovery mode and use csrutil to enable research guest operating systems)

I think what is concerning is that they are expanding into Google Cloud and NVIDIA to run with it too with their versions of confidential compute, which if I remember correctly are not as well verified as Apple PCC and a little harder for researchers to get their hands on.

Apple uses a key ceremony process where no single party has access to all the keys required to sign hardware, meaning in theory they can’t just sign malicious hardware. However, I’m not sure how Google and NVIDIA play into this and I don’t think they’ve provided much detail on it. I think it seems a little rushed to get the features out since they fucked up with initial Apple Intelligence release.

[tguedes]

From my understanding of the architecture, Apple and Google have basically developed a fork of Gemini that is built to run on Apple's PCC. There is no data being sent to any Google servers.

From this MacRumors article:

"The new architecture centers on Apple Foundation Models co-developed with Google, which Apple says are adapted to run both on-device and on servers through its existing Private Cloud Compute infrastructure."

And

"The company reiterated that Apple Intelligence relies on on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, with a promise that user data is only used to execute the immediate request and is not accessible to Apple or third parties. Apple added that outside experts can verify those privacy guarantees "at any time.""

[brianmcnulty]

That seems to conflict with the recent security blog that says they are using Google Cloud infra and NVIDIA GPUs with PCC now [0].

They are allowing it to run on Intel and NVIDIA and Google chips meeting certain requirements now too instead of just Apple silicon because they think they’re secure enough now, but I suspect this decision might have been pushed by the need for Siri to be useful.

I still definitely think it’s better than what every other company is trying to do (like running a variant of OpenClaw 24/7 forwarding data to Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and every other provider they can support).

[0] https://security.apple.com/blog/expanding-pcc/

[criley2]

What does verify mean?

Can they verify the private cloud is completely immune to nationstate actors, has no zero-day vulnerabilities, is completely bulletproof in a court of law and can never be compelled to secretly share info with government(s), etc?

I think the users fear here is real. "We did good due diligence at the consumer level" and "we're completely immune to nationstate hackers and clandestine legal cases" are very different things.

[brookst]

You should read the paper.

Like any good security paper, it doesn’t assert immunity to particular parties. Instead, covers things like how PCC attests that the running software image is identical to the publicly-available, forensically-studied one.

Fear is real for sure, but don’t let fear be an excuse to lose rigor in thinking.

[TalkingCodeMonk]

What if the CA certs are compromised, as was alluded to for GCP in the Snowden leaks?

All server security measures are irrelevant if every client req/res is dragnet siphoned off to NSA servers in plaintext. It would also afford the corporation deniability even if they were aware or involved.

This is why everything than can feasibly be E2EE (or performed locally) should be, unless the data is explicitly public. There are too many opportunities for compromise even when the provider has the best of intentions, and ruling class psychopaths aren't intentionally destroying democracy or implementing big brother.

[criley2]

This is a non-answer, and in fact, a statement like "don't let fear be an excuse to lose rigor in thinking" in response to my question "how verifiable are their claims" is insulting and sloppy. Rigor in thinking includes human discussion and humans asking questions, but yet you shot that down.

ChatGPT, do what this user wouldn't, and answer the dang question:

> No, Apple cannot verify that Private Cloud Compute is completely immune to nation-state actors, contains no zero-days, or could never be subjected to secret legal compulsion. Nobody can honestly establish those absolutes for a complicated, evolving computer system operating across multiple jurisdictions.

> What Apple has done is more meaningful than ordinary corporate “due diligence,” however. PCC is specifically engineered to make clandestine access—whether by hackers, insiders, or governments—technically difficult, difficult to target, and more likely to leave externally detectable evidence...

> Against ordinary attackers, rogue employees, conventional cloud administrators and routine government data requests, PCC appears exceptionally strong for a cloud AI service.

> Against a targeted nation-state willing to combine zero-days, supply-chain compromise, endpoint exploitation, legal pressure and secrecy, the right description is: Highly resistant, deliberately difficult to target, and unusually auditable—but not immune.

Thanks ChatGPT. Don't know why I bother to ask humans anymore, it's StackOverflow the whole way down.

[saagarjha]

How are security researchers going to have access to the Nvidia GPUs that will be running this?

[brookst]

It’s a fair concern, but the only way to reconcile a belief that Apple is sharing data from PCC with anyone (including themselves) is to assert the whole PCC thing is a massive fraud.

Which it could be, but given both breadth of claim and Apple’s strong incentives not to be caught lying about something so massive, I’d want something more than vibes to take the idea seriously.

[Geee]

There's no guarantee against data exfiltration, because the data leaks happens through tool calls, which are not made from the PCC, but from your own device.

E.g. "the user asks if their Bitcoin private key is unique, let's make a web search".

Combined with prompt injection attacks, it's quite easy for an attacker to craft a prompt which sends your private data through any supported tool call (web search, database search, email, app APIs, etc.). Everything is wide open for the attacker / or yourself accidentally to exfiltrate your data.

[JimDabell]

That doesn’t make sense in this context – the point of PCC is so you know somebody isn’t snooping on your information when you send it to the servers. The person I was responding to seemed to think that Apple would be looking at that information.

[Geee]

You're right, but also "PCC is very secure" might give a false sense of security, considering that there might be other associated vulnerabilities in these kinds of systems.

[fragmede]

Which is a good point. set a Bitcoin wallet private key in an obvious place on your system, and then setup a monitor (on another system) to notify you if its contents gets stolen.

Doesn't prevent the exfiltration but at least you'll know when it does.

[shaky-carrousel]

And we have to believe that it's not backdoored because they say so? That's incredibly naïve.

[JimDabell]

No. I provided the link so you could read more about it.

[9dev]

I have read it. The entire trust hinges on several critical points, such as trusting secure boot.

You remember when the NSA injected itself in TLS termination at all major cloud providers? You remember when several giant automotive corporations built elaborate detection of testing scenarios to fake emissions? You remember room 641A?

I have no real way to tell if this is security Theater or meaningful protection. None of us has,

[shaky-carrousel]

That's "because they said so" but with more words. Sorry, but a pretty blog post is not proof enough.

[paulluuk]

> I use a lot of AI professionally, but I haven't even turned on Bixby or whatever the Samsung AI is called.

I know this was just a small aside, but man do I hate Bixby and other phone AIs. They are so frustratingly difficult to turn off, and turning them on accidentally is as simply as holding the wrong button for a few seconds, such as when your phone is in your pocket. Very frustrating design.

[Quothling]

I never turned Bixby on, so it never really bothers me except for when I update and it want me to accept something which I decline. I turned the button off, I forgot what I switched it to but holy hell was that annoying.

[paulluuk]

I never turned Bixby on either, but on my phone is comes pre-installed and pre-turned-on, and you can't uninstall it, only "deactivate" it.

[embedding-shape]

I just want to be able to turn things off without affecting completely other unrelated things. Like Siri and Carplay, makes no sense I need one activated to use the other, just a trick to get people to avoid disabling Siri.

[giancarlostoro]

> I would be surprised if any of my data on Apple services was actually kept private from the US government

Outside of law enforcement having a warrant, Apple's efforts against CSAM, or their Chinese data centers, I've not heard of Apple doing any of what you assume in a post-Snowden world. iMessage is supposed to be end to end encrypted, and there was a few years ago that whole scandal where Apple wouldn't unlock a literal terrorists cell phone for the FBI.

The FBI had to reach out to... a third party to unlock the phone (I forget the name of the firm that did it - Cellebrite maybe?) for them, what's funny is they spent a lot of money on it, when the rest of the world pointed out that the very specific iOS version in question had known vulnerabilities they could have found online for free (or cheaper?).